D-Day for Holden tomorrow

[Bossxr8]

Originally Posted by 2011G6E

How do we "protect the local industry" and what exactly would that mean?

There's really only two ways to do it: Go back to the bad old days by severely limiting consumers choices by heavily taxing all imports, or using even more taxpayers dollars to heavily subsidise cars that, to be blunt, people just don't want anymore, ie: Falcon and to a lesser extent Commodore...?

Tax imports and impose stupid tariffs like we had in the old days, and you also have to realise that you are forgetting one little thing...how many cars on the showroom floor at Holden and Ford dealers are actually made here in Australia? They're nearly all "imports", and if you tried to tax and tariff one import, but allow another in unrestricted, you will very quickly find yourself in trouble before the world trade organisation and facing severe retaliatory action from countries that import our goods to their countries.

Subsidise with taxpayers dollars the few cars that are actually built here, and you breed lazy manufacturers, knowing that the public is virtually being forced to buy whatever they make.


There's no easy answers, but pretending that you can force the public to buy cars they don't want isn't facing reality.

There's plenty of other way to support locally made cars, tariffs would be last on the list. They could do what most other countries do with imported vehicles, finding reasons to tax them, we should put the same taxes on their cars as they put on ours, and they can offer incentives to buying Australian, like cheaper rego, less stamp duty and gst etc.

Your idea that it would force people to buy locally made cars and that the manufacturers would then get lazy is idiotic, because the imported cars are still available to anyone who wants one, but they don't get the incentives a buyer of a locally made car would get. The competition is still there so they can't get lazy and reduce quality etc, plus Toyota and Holden export so it would destroy export sales by doing that.